Dr. John Haylor

Principal Lecturer

Dr Haylor was appointed as a Principal Lecturer in the School of Medicine in 2015. He is a pharmacologist with an interest in drug prescribing. His research career, initially as a physiologist, has centred on pharmacological approaches to slow the progression of chronic kidney disease.

Full Profile

After initial training as a hospital pharmacist, Dr Haylor developed a research career in studying the kidney in health and disease. Dr Haylor was previously a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Infection and Immunity at Sheffield Medical School with over 30 years experience of teaching pharmacology to science, medical and dental undergraduates. In recent years, he was responsible for the medical undergraduate curriculum in pharmacology in Sheffield together with the introduction of the national Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA) for final year medical students.

Dr Haylor’s research career began with an interest in renal physiology and the role of the eicosanoid pathway and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. The first of two major collaborations was with radiologists in Diagnostic Imaging involved studying the role of the vascular endothelium in the nephrotoxic response to iodine-based contrast media. More recently, studies centred around nephrogenic systemic fibrosis, a chronic condition induced by MRI-based contrast media containing gadolinium in patients with chronic renal failure.

The second major collaboration was with clinical nephrologists at the Sheffield Kidney Institute centred on the development of drugs to slow the progression of chronic kidney disease, leading to a reduction in the requirement for renal replacement therapy. Approaches involving the growth hormone/IGF-I axis initially looked promising but unfortunately little benefit was obtained by patients with end stage kidney disease using the recombinant IGF-I hormone. Pharmacological intervention in chronic models of rodent kidney disease including hypertension, diabetes and transplantation eventually provided evidence for the role of the protein cross-linking enzyme, transglutaminase in the development of renal fibrosis. With the aid of MRC funding, an inhibitory monoclonal antibody against the transglutaminase enzyme was developed and examined for its ability to inhibit renal fibrosis with the potential for initial human trials to be undertaken in 2016.